Never too old for a fieldtrip!

Fieldtrips are a pain in the butt—and I don’t mean figuratively—I mean my butt actually hurts.

My health and fitness writing class (shout out!) traveled to IMG Academies yesterday, which is basically an athlete boarding school in Sarasota. From the moment our 20ish-person class boarded a monster 56-passenger charter bus instead of the mini bus we requested (we all had our own row), I knew it was going to be an awesome trip. Our bus driver, also known as Vin Diesel, told us to “Holla” at him if we needed anything. Right on.

Like any good fieldtrip, we popped in a DVD, Love Actually, and half the class promptly fell asleep. Time flies when you’re sleeping, that and when your gigantic bus is weaving through traffic like a souped-up Mustang GT in the Fast and Furious. We made good time for a car—a little over two hours. For a charter bus—we flew.

After getting lost for about half an hour (another hallmark of a true fieldtrip), we rolled up to IMGA and piled out in our sweats in tennis shoes as if, just maybe, we were athletes and not journalists. If anyone made this mistake at first, we definitely straightened them out later.

IMGA is one a complete alternate world. This place breeds super athletes. From age 12 to graduating high school senior, students live on the resort-like campus, and their life seemingly has two focuses: First (and I do mean first priority), their sport. Second, school.

When students aren’t in class at one of the four schools on campus, they are on the tennis court, the soccer field, IMGA’s impressive gym, or wherever else their specific sport may demand. IMGA specializes in tennis, basketball, baseball, soccer and golf. Aside from being coached by some of the best in their individual sports, these student-athletes receive other training. They hone mental skills and concentration with special exercises to condition the mind. They take acting and improve classes to learn communication skills—critical to athletes often interviewed by the press. They have an individualized eating regimen and sometimes report their daily diet to a nutritionist for evaluation.

Athletic excellence is almost down to a science at IMGA, one that cranks out powerful results. The number of college-bound IMGA graduates that leave with an athletic scholarship—85 percent.

Perhaps I too could have been a collegiate athlete had I attended IMGA, I thought. Then our class got the chance to participate in an IMGA warm-up. Never before have I felt so out of shape and uncoordinated. The 36-year-old (could have been 25-year-old) trainer with blond highlights and curly surfer-bum hair lined our class along a strip of rubber track and directed us in various hopping, lunging, and arm-waving exercises. He even threw in some ballet moves. Hence the butt pain. Then Mr. Athletic told us to skip. This is when I realized that I may very well have been an IMGA dropout. I cannot skip, at least without looking like I’m having a seizure while running. Where would my IMGA class standing be—the bottom 15 percent.